The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.

And I try to give the best bang for the buck. I love performing more than anything else.

I believe that my parents did wonderful things for us.

My greatest blessing has been the birth of my son. My next greatest blessing has been my ability to turn people into children of mine.

Really I don’t like human nature unless all candied over with art.

The happiest part of a man’s life is what he passes lying awake in bed in the morning.

While on top of Everest, I looked across the valley towards the great peak Makalu and mentally worked out a route about how it could be climbed. It showed me that even though I was standing on top of the world, it wasn’t the end of everything. I was still looking beyond to other interesting challenges.

Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, uses that something to support their own existence.

I give thanks to God and to all the people in the U.K. who have supported me over the years.

Good ideas are free – or at least they should be.

I’ve made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I’m convinced of the opposite.

Old is authentic. Old is genuine. Old is valuable.

I grew up with the biologists. I know how they think.

I, personally, think there is a really danger of taking food too seriously. Food should be part of the bigger picture.

To some extent I liken slavery to death.

I actually feel like women in my position, when we have all at our disposal to help us, shouldn’t complain when we consider all of the people who are really struggling and don’t have the means or support. Many people are single, raising children. That’s hard.

We can be thankful to a friend for a few acres, or a little money; and yet for the freedom and command of the whole earth, and for the great benefits of our being, our life, health, and reason, we look upon ourselves as under no obligation.

Go up in an airplane. Go high enough, and it’s like we don’t even exist.

All our actions, as well as our thoughts and words, should praise Him who always blesses us.

Of the blessings set before you make your choice, and be content.

See, when you drive home today, you’ve got a big windshield on the front of your car. And you’ve got a little bitty rearview mirror. And the reason the windshield is so large and the rearview mirror is so small is because what’s happened in your past is not near as important as what’s in your future.

I liked his ability to deal with a lot of the negativity that surrounded him. Even though he was in a world that he didn’t want to be in, he still saw the bigger picture.

Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.

I can be almost terminally grief-stricken because things are so dire, but at the same time, there’s a real lightheartedness about just the recoverability of life, of how things change, how they’re not the same, ever again.

Old age is not a matter for sorrow. It is matter for thanks if we have left our work done behind us.

I’ve been blessed in that regard through and through. So I’m just thankful for this opportunity to play the game that I love and share that with the world.

The art of acceptance is the art of making someone who has just done you a small favor wish that he might have done you a greater one.

I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual.

You just want something else that someone else has, but that doesn’t mean what you have isn’t beautiful, because people always want what you have, and you always want what they have – no one is ever 100 per cent like, ‚Yes, I’m the bomb dot com – from head to toe!‘

The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.

Be thankful we’re not getting all the government we’re paying for.

No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.

From my standpoint, being an artist, I want to see what the new construction is between artist and audience.

There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.

The happiness of this life depends less on what befalls you than the way in which you take it.

See how many are better off than you are, but consider how many are worse.

For me, money is not my definition of success. Inspiring people is a definition of success.

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.

Things have never been more like the way they are today in history.

Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are… than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.

When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.

Capital is money, capital is commodities. By virtue of it being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.

Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.

All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.

Surely a long life must be somewhat tedious, since we are forced to call in so many trifling things to help rid us of our time, which will never return.

War does not determine who is right – only who is left.

There are some days when I think I’m going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.

The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.

It is not how much we have, but how much we enjoy, that makes happiness.

Sooner or later we’re all someone’s dog.

Man only likes to count his troubles, but he does not count his joys.

On the other hand, you have different fingers.

Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.

What’s real freedom? Real freedom is being able to not have my way and still be just as happy as if I did.

Every wall is a door.

As you get older, time speeds up but life slows down.

A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride.

Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.

I think everyone should approach relationships from the perspective of playing it straight and giving someone the benefit of the doubt. Until he establishes that this is a game. And if it’s a game, you need to win. The best thing to do is just walk away from the table.

When you’re doing a film and the majority of the film is cast black, for me, it’s most important to get people to view those movies as just movies, as just good movies. At the end of the day, regardless of the color of the cast, we’re all doing the same thing in this business: trying to make a good film.